Ableton Live Intermediate – Course Materials

Level 5 Overview

This week, we’ll be exploring the awesome creative potential of Ableton’s Drum Rack. We’ll discuss a number of ways of creating beats, with reference to the work of some classic producers, and see how their distinctive approaches can be applied to your own productions.

Courtesy of our partners Loopmasters.com. Please note that these free samples are for demonstration purposes – students can use them in their own tracks but if they want to use them in a commercial manner, they must purchase the full packs.

Essential Resources

Pensado’s Place is a weekly YouTube show, presented by Grammy Award winning mixer Dave Pensado and his manager Herb Trawick, featuring interviews with the créme de la créme of the audio production industry. It’s a wealth of knowledge, both from a technical and professional standpoint, and it’s usually entertaining. You can play it on your phone while you cook, or take the bus or the car to work…

Groove3 offers excellent tutorials on audio software and hardware, although you’ll have to pay for them.

There are thousands of brilliant production tutorials available on YouTube. Some of the best come from Point Blank and Dubspot.

Sound On Sound is a great monthly publication, available in print or online. Perfect for finding reviews of gear, as well as tutorials and other audio news.

Gearslutz is one of the world’s biggest audio forums and can be a great place to pick up tips and discuss all things audio.

Recommended Reading

Two excellent resources here on mixing and mastering audio. Both books contain a great wealth of technical information, coupled with an appreciation of its artistic applications:

Use the Drum Rack’s internal mixer to add insert effects. Use reverb and delay on return channels to enhance the sense of space and depth around the drums, or to add interesting rhythmic additions.

A bass line. This could be a deep synth, or recorded bass guitar, or double bass, or a bass voice…

A sequence of chords. You could use a synth, or record a guitar, or a harp, or a piano…

A melody line. You might use a synthesizer, or your voice, or a friend’s voice, or a glockenspiel, or a harmonica…

Use the mixer to balance the levels of each channel, and use the pan pots to place the instruments appropriately in the stereo field

Get creative with effects! Try lots of effects and combinations, and don’t be scared to turn all the dials – you never know what you’ll come up with. Do bear in mind also that effects aren’t always necessary – sometimes ‘clean’ is the perfect sound. In this case though, we want to explore lots of sonic possibilities.

Add reverb and delay to your mix using Return channels.

Apply a Limiter at the end of the Master chain.

Assignment Submission Guidelines

You must submit both a Soundcloud link to your track, and an archived Project Folder.

Export your track as a 44.1khz, 16bit WAV file. You can use the Upload Audio to Soundcloud option in the Export Audio/Video… dialogue (read more here) or follow the steps below to upload your tracks at a later date.

Upload your track to Soundcloud. If you don’t have an account already, the sign up process is easy and the service is free.

Use the Collect All and Save function (File > Collect All and Save) to collect all of the project media in to the Project Folder.

Use 7-Zip (or a similar program) on Windows, or the built in Compress command on Mac OS (Right Click folder > Compress) to compress this folder to an archive.

Email the archive and the Soundcloud link to ross@secretschoolofsound.ie.

Level 6 Overview

This week, we’ll be exploring the frequency domain and its applications in producing and mixing. We’ll discuss a number of functions of the equaliser, and how it can be applied in mix situations as well as creative scenarios.

Equalization is one of the most powerful tools in your sonic toolkit and can be your greatest enemy or your greatest ally in the battle for the perfect sound.
It is always best to ensure that you get as good a sound as possible from the microphone, synth or sampler coming into the mixing console. If you start off with good sounds, then a good result is almost inevitable.

You should always aim to use EQ to improve an already wonderful sound. If the sound isn’t good without EQ, then you will never end up with anything but second best. The only time you should ever use EQ to ‘save’ a sound is when you have been given a tape to work on that was recorded by a lazy engineer.

Nobody is born with the inbuilt ability to EQ. You can only learn through experience and a lot of careful listening.

Use the Test Tone under Preferences / Audio to sweep through the frequency spectrum

The human ear is capable of hearing frequencies in the range from about 20Hz up to about 20,000Hz (20k). Everything audible in a recording falls somewhere in this range or thereabouts and a given instrument (or any other sound) will occupy certain frequencies more dominantly than others.

For example, a hi-hat cymbal would have significant amplitude (volume) between around 3k to 5k and would have virtually no amplitude at 30Hz. Likewise, a bass guitar will have a lot of amplitude around 80Hz and next to none at 10k. In other words, most instruments will have a dominant frequency range that constitutes the “meat” of the sound.

If you apply this theory across all of the tracks in your mix, you can imagine how each track (instrument, voice) will primarily occupy a certain range of frequencies.

It would be fantastic if it were that simple. However, they will also occupy other frequencies in less significant amplitudes that make up some of the characteristics of the sound. For example, the “thump” of a kick drum might be around 60Hz while the “click” might be around 2k or higher.

Many of these sound sources will occupy overlapping frequency ranges. If two sounds are trying to occupy the same frequency at similar amplitudes, they will fight with each other, creating a muddy sound and losing definition from both sound sources, a phenomenon known as Masking.

Shelving filters are often used when an overall change of timbre is required. For example, you could make the drums brighter by boosting the highs. They are similar to Pass Filters in that they operate above or below a specified frequency, but unlike pass filters, but they can cut or boost.

1) Open one of your finished compositions and see how compression can be applied on individual tracks to achieve the following results:

Achieving a consistent, powerful signal from recorded part

Exaggerate the sustain of any sound

Enhance the percussive or rhythmic qualities of an instrument

2) Experiment with sidechain compression on various instruments. You can try triggering (or “keying”) the sidechain directly from a kick drum, or perhaps by muting the sidechain trigger and adding an independent kick pattern.

3) Read up about classic compressors, and the myriad uses of compression. This article from Sound on Sound is a great starting point, and YoUTube videos are an excellent resource for seeing in real time how various instruments can be treated in a mix. Try searching “how to mix bass guitar”. “how to mix drums”, or “how to compress vocals” etc.

Level 8 Overview

In our final class, we will explore the harmonic series, and its relation to the science and art of equalisation. We’ll also take a brief tour of Operator, and try some applications for Ableton’s Vocoder.

How to set up the vocoder with an external carrier

Place a Vocoder on the track to be affected
Add an external carrier instrument. Try adding a MIDI track and placing an instance of Operator or Analog here.
On the Vocoder, set the Carrier to External, then choose the desired instrument track as the Audio From source.
If you have not already done so, add some notes in the Operator channel.

Use the Drum Rack’s internal mixer to add insert effects. Use reverb and delay on return channels to enhance the sense of space and depth around the drums, or to add interesting rhythmic additions.

A bass line. This could be a deep synth, or recorded bass guitar, or double bass, or a bass voice…

A sequence of chords. You could use a synth, or record a guitar, or a harp, or a piano…

A melody line. You might use a synthesizer, or your voice, or a friend’s voice, or a glockenspiel, or a harmonica…

Use the mixer to balance the levels of each channel, and use the pan pots to place the instruments appropriately in the stereo field

Get creative with effects! Try lots of effects and combinations, and don’t be scared to turn all the dials – you never know what you’ll come up with. Do bear in mind also that effects aren’t always necessary – sometimes ‘clean’ is the perfect sound. In this case though, we want to explore lots of sonic possibilities.

Add reverb and delay to your mix using Return channels.

Experiment with the vocoder. See of you can emulate the Herbie Hancock / Daft Punk sound, but also try to use the vocoder to produce new, unexpected effects.